I am thinking of my mother and bees.

So I took some of my tax return money and bought books on The Merovingians. Although I've read about them enough to know the basics, I really needed to own the books since The Merovingian mindset is included in my current WIP. When I chose this period, I did not realize it was the least researched period in France, but then that might be why my mother suggested it. Laughing. It's difficult to believe that Mother was alive when I came up with this thorny project and that it would be years and years before I actually began the work. Another decade. Mother was an amateur Medievalist, the kind who could recite lists of Kings and Queens, their notable bio without so much as lifting a book. This is what she read all her life, it was her first love. If she had been online and computer savvy, her passwords would have been either a long list of initials for obscure medieval Popes or maybe some event in the life of the Black Prince. Today I thought of my mother and bees, and I cried. There is no mother to talk about these things. No mother to offer sage advice. No mother who had a better memory at 80 than I do now. This project is reckless I know. I may never finish it. I may finish it and know that it is a disaster. It is the most "alone" work I have ever done.